"Truth has already ceased to be itself if polemically said."
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Quote collection
Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes (page 148 of 211)
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"I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways."
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"I am the owner of the sphere, Of the seven stars and the solar year, of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain, Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakespeare's strain."
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"Delicious is a just and firm encounter of two in a thought, in a feeling."
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"Every man passes his life in the search after friendship."
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"The moment our discourse rises above the ground-line of familiar facts, and is inflamed with passion or exalted thought, it clothes itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that always a material image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought.... This imagery is spontaneous. It is the blending of experience with the present action of the mind. It is proper creation."
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"The evils of popular government appear greater than they are; there is compensation for them in spirit and energy it awakens."
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"To say then, the majority are wicked, means no malice, no bad heart in the observer, but, simply that the majority are unripe, andhave not yet come to themselves, do not yet know their opinion."
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"What matters most is not what is behind us or before us, but what is within us."
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"That for which Paul lived and died so gloriously; that for which Jesus gave himself to be crucified; the end that animated the thousand martyrs and heroes who have followed his steps, was to redeem us from a formal religion, and teach us to seek our well-being in the formation of the soul."
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"Government has been a fossil: it should be a plant."
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"Conservatism, ever more timorous and narrow, disgusts the children, and drives them for a mouthful of fresh air into radicalism."
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"Our friends early appear to us as representatives of certain ideas, which they never pass or exceed. They stand on the brink of the ocean of thought and power, but they never take a single step that would bring them there."
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"People forget that it is the eye which makes the horizon, and the rounding mind's eye which makes this or that man a type or representative of humanity with the name of hero or saint."
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"There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrate to some stroke of the imagination."
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"But in our experience, man is cheap and friendship wants its deep sense. We affect to dwell with our friends in their absence, but we do not; when deed, word, or letter comes not, they let us go."
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"Sentimentalists ... adopt whatever merit is in good repute, and almost make it hateful with their praise. The warmer their expressions, the colder we feel.... Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debauchee of sentiment?"
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"The way to learn German, is, to read the same dozen pages over and over a hundred times, till you know every word and particle in them, and can pronounce and repeat them by heart."
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"If you visit your friend, why need you apologize for not having visited him, and waste his time and deface your own act? Visit him now."
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"The nonconformist and the rebel say all manner of unanswerable things against the existing republic, but discover to our sense no plan of house or state of their own."
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